There’s enough carbon in a single box of Girl Scout cookies to cover thirty football fields. I’ll do the math for you — that’s $15 billion in today’s graphene prices.

OK, so it’s not that simple, but the point is commercial manufacturing of graphene seems readily attainable, and as the prices come down it will be showing up in a technological device near you.

But wait, I haven’t even gotten to the coolest part of this story yet. That is, to demonstrate his point, Tour invited Girl Scouts of America Troop 25080 into his lab to see a box of cookies transformed into graphene.

Here’s a dumb question from an uninitiated: what, for example, ARE they thinking of doing with it? It reminds me of when the lazer beam was invented in Bell Labs in 1962. It was pretty cool but other than a future use as a death ray there was little it could do. They later found you could turn the beam on and off real fast and send digital data except that it couldn’t penetrate fog and could only travel in straight lines for limited distances through the air. It awaited the development of super pure glass and fiber optics. I have no idea where this thing will lead, but someone does.

Excellent question. Graphene has many uses. There’s another story at Rice that shows it being used for clear and flexible touchscreens. Imagine an iPhone that you can fold up and put in your pocket without fear of breaking the glass: http://youtu.be/d-P6_BMsHSw

Re: For now graphene, a sheet made of a single layer of carbon atoms,. . .

Looks like a good use for all the carbon coming out of coal fired power plants.

The only problem I had with the video of the guys opening up the GS cookies and making graphene was that they didn’t bite into that cookie. I actually salivated. Since they didn’t, I am wondering if I can trust those guys.

30 football fields, not 3; my mistake, so the math does work out to more or less $15 billion.

Another graphene paper published by the Tour lab this week (see http://tinyurl.com/ricescreens) shows the promise of graphene to be made cheaply and in bulk for things like touch screens, solar panels and LED lighting.

The cookies are classic shortbreads.

As to why they didn’t eat the experimental cookies: These are disciplined scientists! (But I can’t confirm they didn’t scarf down the rest of the box when we all left. I would have.)

Hmmm, One cookie for graphene, one cookie for me. One cookie for graphene, one cookie for me. One cookie for graphene, one cookie for me. One cookie for graphene, one cookie for me……………. Whoops, just ate $7.5 billion.

The reason they did not eat the cookies is to maintain lab safety. It is not safe to eat in a lab where other chemicals have been used or are stored. Chemicals could be on their labs coats or on their gloves, the benches, labware, etc.

The best analog to this would be aluminum. Back in 1852, aluminum was hard to extract and cost about $1200 per kilogram. Thanks to improvements in the chemical processing, the price dropped to a mere $40 per kilogram in 1859 (but was still far too expensive to use; for comparison, gold was about $600 per kilogram). In 1888, Hall invented a new processing method that eventually brought the price down to 40 cents per kilogram by 1919 and sparked a craze for goods and decorations in the “new” metal.

Right now, graphene is where aluminum was in 1859; it is less expensive than it was, but is still too costly for common use. With more work, it may come down to where aluminum was in 1919 and become so cheap that it is used for decoration as well as more practical endeavors.

I mean if graphenes going to be used for brakes that last for years, airplanes, create super computers and batteries that charge your phone in under a minute. I don’t see how it can be compared to aluminum, people would still pay a premium for this technology.
Also if that best quality graphene needed for big applications comes from high quality graphite demand will exceed supply and the price will remain high. Maybe graphene made cheaply from food can be used for smaller commercial products if they find a way to produce at low cost. I just thought the best graphene comes from quality graphite